


Two Pair

by Barkour



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 13:50:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14717274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: On the eve of the assault on the Almighty and the Red Legion, Cayde-6 and Ikora have something of a philosophical discussion.





	Two Pair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glamafonic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glamafonic/gifts).



Bare bulbs lit the worn dirt yard. Ikora stood alone at the rickety fence overlooking the hard mountain path. Her arms were folded along the wood. 

“Brain didn’t get enough of a work-out in there?” 

Cayde sidled alongside her. Crossing his arms over his chest, he leaned his back against the fence. 

Ikora hummed. The fingers of her right hand plucked at the fingers of the other hand. She’d stripped her gauntlets. This left her wrists tender and dark under the moonlight. Her fingernails were neatly trimmed and painted a bruised red. As ever something of another world clung to her. 

Then she glanced at him and her mouth curled at the corner and she was Ikora, amused. Cayde said sotto voce, “What do you say, you and me make a run for it. Get outta this two horse town.”

Another of her low noises, a sort of laugh in her nose. “Oh? Should we hitch up the wagon?”

“We’ll need one of the horses for that.”

“If you can make your way around a chicken,” said Ikora, “I suppose you can manage a horse.”

“Do you know,” said Cayde thoughtfully, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a horse in my life.”

Ikora’s smile was tired. It pulled the fine wrinkles at her eyes.

“Extinct,” she said. 

“Ah,” said Cayde. “I can sympathize. Or is it empathize?” He tapped a hand on his arm. “Well, nothing to it. Guess we’ll have to blow the bastards out of the sky. It’ll be interesting, dying.”

“The great mystery,” said Ikora. Her eyes were on the horizon again, looking down the sprawl of hard-scrabble mountain green at the red-veined bulk of the Traveler, far from them. “How many times have we died? And yet we have never truly crossed that river to the final, unknown country.”

A shade of moonlight made a knife’s edge along her face. Cayde dug a heel into the thin and battered soil. He said, “I don’t plan on doing much dying tomorrow.”

“Yes, our plan should work,” said Ikora, “so long as we all remember it.”

“Improvisation okay,” said Cayde. “Got it. So tell me,” he went on, nudging her shoulder with his on so she swayed, gently. “No last regrets? No great fears?”

“Only the usual,” she said. 

Ikora looked at him fully then. As it always did to him, the weight of her regard seemed to change within Cayde the shape of him, or at least his understanding of his self. Yeah, he wasn’t the best guy for the job, but here he was and here was a job that needed doing so he’d better do it.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to say anything. That was the thing about Ikora. All of it, everything, it was in her eyes. Dark eyes, yeah, rimmed with darker lashes. The weight of those lines around her eyes. Her eyes like a balancing scale. Cayde knew grief. He’d gotten bitter-stupid on it same as anyone else. He knew resignation too, and fury.

“Yeah,” said Cayde hoarsely. “Yeah. I don’t wanna die either.”

Ikora’s mouth compressed a thin fraction. She dipped her chin: a nod. 

Maybe they _would_ die tomorrow, he thought. He’d figured on dying all the way back on Nessus. Take the shot, then die, but he’d have done his job. He realized he hadn’t lied. He didn’t want to die. _Commander Zavala’s still alive,_ the young wolf had told him. And Ikora? he’d asked. What about Ikora? 

Think of someone actually managing to net the Traveler. Then think: we survived that. And maybe they only survived so they could go off and die for real this time, but shit, at least he was in good company. Cayde hadn’t done a damn thing good enough to justify having the chance to go down fighting alongside someone like Ikora Rey, but any gambler knew better than to toss a lucky hand. 

Ikora was giving him an odd look. Her eyebrows had tilted up on the insides, making the cutest furrow between her serious eyes.

Cayde said, “Was I saying all that out loud?”

“Most of it, I imagine,” said Ikora. “‘The cutest little furrow’?”

“It’s darling as all get out,” said Cayde. “Can I tell you something? Ikora. Ikora? It’s like I had some kind of, you know, like a flash of thunder, like kapow! All the lightbulbs are going on.”

“An epiphany?”

“Sure, if you wanna call it that. Hey, Ikora, I don’t want to die. And I don’t want you to die either, or Zavala, or anybody else.” 

She said, “I know you don’t,” bemused.

Cayde pushed off the fence. His arms unfolded. He grabbed her arms, very lightly, in his hands. The fine-tuned superficial sensors in his armor plating registered the softness of flesh beneath her linens. 

“Right, right, what kind of psychopath wants people to die? But the thing is, what I’m trying to say—”

Ikora was giving him that look now, the one that said _Cayde, you moron,_ and he couldn’t live if he didn’t get to see that face for the rest of his life looking at him and saying, _Cayde, you moron._

He _was_ a moron. He couldn’t believe he’d gone and done the same thing all over again, falling in— feeling like— wanting to— for someone who was going to walk out of his life and die, and maybe this time he’d die too but that wasn’t exactly a comfort, to think well, howdy hey, Andal died alone and in agony, but at least I can hold Ikora’s hand while we die, I can only presume also in agony.

Ikora was saying, “What _are_ you trying to say?”

And like that, looking up at her, it went out of him. Maybe the rest of his life was tomorrow. Well, what was one more regret?

“Ah, forget it,” said Cayde, letting go. His hands slid to her elbows then dropped away. 

Ikora said, “Cayde.”

“It’s nothing, Ikora. Forget it. Just my mouth getting ahead of me. You know how it runs. I oughta break its kneecaps—”

Her fingers pressed to his jaw. A firm and precise pressure, to turn his face to her again. The micro-microscopic sensors embedded in his facial plates recorded the heat of her skin. They could not record the texture. Her fingerprints were scanned and already stored in his memory; the whorls, he could not feel. Cayde stood very still. It hurt him to do so.

Ikora said, her eyes on him, her voice a command: “Cayde.”

He said, “It’s just, we might die, and I want you to know that you can shoot me after if you want,” and he leaned in and he kissed her. 

It wasn’t much of a kiss, not like the kind of kiss he imagined the strange ancestral human version of Cayde might have enjoyed. He bet that sucker enjoyed ‘em and didn’t even know one day he’d sell his brain to a corporate monopoly and never again kiss like they did in the movies. Cayde didn’t have lips, only plating, and an exhaust port in his mouth that vented heat in a concentrated rush against her mouth.

He withdrew. He said brightly, “Well, I hope that was as uncomfortable for you as it was for me.”

Ikora said, “Cayde,” and he said, “Should I have asked first? Yes. Did I tell you you could shoot me? Also yes,” and Ikora said, “ _Cayde_ ,” and he said, “If you die, Andal died, and I cannot be a warlock vanguard,” because he was, as she knew, a moron, and Ikora said:

Well, she didn’t say anything that time. She kissed him back. “What?” he said. She just went on kissing him. Cayde stood there with his hands hanging limp at his sides and Ikora breathing softly against his metal plates and her lips warm, the lower lip turning out just so as to leave the faintest smear of moisture against his face. It was like he was stuck in that teleporter loop again only this time engrams and glimmer and Jovian exotics were showering down on him.

She pulled away. Her lashes were on her cheeks. Cayde just kept standing there, like critical components of his secondary and tertiary reactors had failed, causing a systems-wide shutdown to prevent damaging joint spasms. 

Her lashes rose. Her eyes showed dark, dark but limned with the glow of the moon and the distant, hazy glow of the Traveler. 

She said, “Tomorrow, we will fight. We will fight, and we will live.”

Cayde raised his hand, not knowing entirely that he had done so till he was covering her hand on his jaw. He tucked his thumb into her palm. The beat of her heart thrummed against his plated knuckles.

He said, “It’s a hell of a gamble.”

“What’s the worst that could happen, gambler?”

“Well,” he said, “we could die.”

“Mm,” she agreed. She slipped her hand out from under his hand. Ikora folded her hands at her back. She took a step away from him. Yes, a step back and away, but how she looked at him, how she _looked_. As if a storm had settled in her, a cloud moving from the face of the sun. “But consider. We might live.”

“You really believe that.”

“Don’t you?” 

He thought to say, believe we could die? or c’mon, don’t you know better than to bet against the house? or even: come back here and kiss me again. He looked at Ikora there in her high-collared tunic, her hair close-shaven and made a black shadow against her dark, brown skin, devoid of the Light but still tall and certain and wonderful. If he asked, would she wear Andal’s cape for him? What a hell of a thing.

Cayde said, “Yeah. I think I do.”


End file.
